Пляска Тамары

second half of the 1880s

His father sees the first “Demon”, which is destroyed

While painting Kiev’s churches, Vrubel was simultaneously turning to the image of the Demon. His father, visiting Kiev, was horrified by his son’s poverty — “no warm blanket, no warm coat” — and disgusted by the first version of the “Demon”; the artist destroyed the painting, as he did much else he made in Kiev.

second half of the 1880s

His designs for St Volodymyr’s Cathedral rejected

Prakhov brought Vrubel into the decoration of St Volodymyr’s Cathedral but rejected his own designs — among them at least six versions of “The Lamentation at the Tomb”: their originality would have wrecked the unity of the ensemble, and for such murals, Prakhov remarked, one would have to build a church “in a completely special style”. Vrubel was left with minor work — ornaments and “The Days of Creation” in one of the ceiling panels after sketches by the Svedomsky brothers.

September 1889

The move to Moscow

After rushing to Kazan to his gravely ill father, in September Vrubel went to Moscow to see friends — and stayed for fifteen years; most likely he was drawn there by an infatuation with a circus horsewoman. He settled in Konstantin Korovin’s studio on Dolgorukovskaya Street; a plan for the two of them to work together with Serov came to nothing, as relations with Serov did not work out.

December 1889

Meeting Savva Mamontov

Korovin introduced Vrubel to the industrialist and patron Savva Mamontov, and in December the artist moved into his house on Sadovaya-Spasskaya Street. Mamontov became his steady patron, though Mamontov’s wife openly called Vrubel “a blasphemer and a drunkard”, and the painter soon moved to a rented flat.

July 1890

Abramtsevo: a passion for ceramics

Having come to Abramtsevo to bid farewell to his friend A. Mamontov, who died on 20 July aged 22, Vrubel stayed on and fell passionately for ceramics — soon he proudly wrote to his sister that he was running a “factory of tiles and terracotta decorations”. For the first time in his life he was no longer a hanger-on in wealthy households and earned well: stove designs, a majolica chapel over A. Mamontov’s grave, a design for an extension to the Mamontovs’ Moscow house.

10 April 1891

Illustrations for Lermontov’s “Demon”

The jubilee two-volume Lermontov, illustrated by 18 artists of whom Vrubel alone was completely unknown to the public, was passed by the censor on 10 April 1891. The press savaged Vrubel’s black-watercolour sheets for their “coarseness, ugliness, caricature and absurdity”, and he became convinced that “true art” is understood by almost no one.